School Choice: Agreeing with Mario CuomoJude Wanniski
September 3, 1997

Memo To: Mario Cuomo From: Jude Wanniski Re:
School Vouchers

I caught you in your "Meet the Press" debate with Pat
Buchanan over "choice" and school vouchers and agree with you that the voucher
idea is a distraction, a blind alley. Pat says vouchers would provide
"competition" between public and private schools, but of course that
competition already exists. Private schools produce students who have higher
SAT scores than those who attend public schools, but that is almost entirely
due to the fact that they have parents who have the time, inclination and
education to parent them outside of school, and the money to pay for private
tuition. In other words, if private schools were outlawed, the same students
would still get the good grades, because their parents would see to it that
they did their homework and had private tutoring. The most conservative
Republicans, who oppose anything public except the military and maybe museums
and zoos, and the Country Club set, who fancy the idea without giving it much
thought, have been pushing school choice out of frustration with the
collapse of public education's performance in the inner cities. It really
can't be assumed that the nation as a whole is unhappy with the way the
57 million elementary and secondary public school kids are being educated. The
problem is that a significant number are not. I agree with you that this
problem can be fixed more easily by understanding the nature of the problem
and fixing it, rather than by introducing a new bifurcated system. I went to
public school through the second grade at P.S. 160 in Brooklyn, then Catholic
school through the eighth grade, then public high school, at Brooklyn Tech,
then public colleges, at Brooklyn College and U.C.L.A. Back in those days, the
only edge you got in parochial school was a religious education. There was
discipline in public and private schools, the difference being that if you
could not be controlled in parochial school you were kicked out into the
public schools, which had to have special schools here and there for the bad
kids. The public school system worked then and there is no reason why it can't
work again.

Where I disagree with you is in your advocacy of higher
federal spending on elementary and secondary schools, public or private. I
don't doubt that an easy $100 billion could be spent on bricks and mortar just
to repair the dilapidation of the public schools. That money should be raised
in public tax-free bond issues at state, county and municipal levels, where
the public will vote approval. This will increasingly happen as the country is
now finally back on a growth track, adding wealth instead of subtracting it by
punishing the formation of capital. When you and I were kids after WWII,
Governor, capital was in surplus and labor in short supply. When kids observe
that their dads are able to support a family of five on a factory job, they at
least shoot to equal their dad's achievement, if not hoping to do better than
he could do, to be able to contribute to the family. When kids see that their
fathers can't find a job with a high school degree, even with a federal job
training program, because there are no jobs that pay more than a subsistence
wage, their own survival instincts turn them away from book learning toward
underground behavior, crime, drugs, and irresponsibility to the girls they
impregnate.

After all these years, reading my book, counting yourself a
"supply-side" Governor, why is it that you still can't resist taking shots at
the Republican advocacy of a lower capital gains tax, as you did on "Meet the
Press." Don't you yet understand that if the public schools are going to be
helped, by any level of government, that wealth has to be created at any or
all levels of the economy? You should be arguing for a lower capital gains tax
at the federal level, which you once did in an interview with the Wall
Street Journal. When there is more capital, labor will be in short
supply, and wages will be bid up. There will be more parents who have the
joint incomes to take their children out of public school into tuition-based
private school. There will be less of a burden on the public school system,
more funds available for the fewer students remaining. If we can double the
wealth of the nation, all parents can afford to put their kids into private
schools, parochial or secular. When that happens, there will be no public
schools. It may take us a generation or two to get there, but that is the way
to make it happen — not by taking tax dollars away from the public schools and
giving them to the private schools. I've never been able to understand why my
conservative friends — including old colleagues at The Wall Street
Journal — can so easily justify having all education spending, public and
private, in one way or another flow through government's hands. Poor people
should not be given taxpayer funds to attend the school of their choice. Once
we do that, the country will be overtaken with all kinds of fruitcake schools
lined up to get a slice of that melon. When public money is involved, the
government must take responsibility for seeing to it that it is properly
spent.

I noticed that Pat Buchanan could not answer your question about
how the federal government will make sure that tax-credit funds are not spent
on parochial schools where the crucifix is on display and where religious
study is mandatory. He has that habit of solving 95% of an intractable
problem, brushing off the 5% that makes his 95% solution unworkable. But
governor, when you blithely announce that the problem can be taken care of by
spending $105 billion instead of cutting the capital gains tax, you are no
better than Buchanan.

The model we should use is that all Americans
should work and save and invest as hard as they can if they wish to enjoy the
things that income and wealth can buy. The government should tax this income
and wealth in order to finance public goods that benefit everyone (including
national defense, museums and zoos) plus those minimum levels of public
service (health, education and welfare) that assure us those who can't take
care of themselves are being taken care of. This means Republicans should not
be asking government to give the poor the kind of education they could afford
if they were rich, or to give the rich public subsidies which they should be
striving to pay themselves. I'm constantly amazed at how easily Beltway
Republicans who decry socialism for the masses can shift to arguments
justifying socialism for the rich.

Just in case you're mistaken about
the overall thrust of this missive, Governor, I am most definitely on your
side — only wishing you were more on mine.